


This Is Only a Test

by Mosca



Category: Scandal (TV)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-12-23
Updated: 2013-12-23
Packaged: 2018-01-05 16:04:47
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,450
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1095928
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Mosca/pseuds/Mosca
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Olivia and Cyrus on the campaign bus, somewhere between Iowa and victory, not sleeping.</p>
            </blockquote>





	This Is Only a Test

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Jae](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Jae/gifts).



> The Olivia/Fitz relationship is important to this fic, as it is to the show, but this story does not focus on their romance.
> 
> I'm grateful to [Nora Bombay](http://archiveofourown.org/users/norabombay/pseuds/norabombay), [Amy](http://archiveofourown.org/users/Amy/pseuds/Amy), and [galfridian](http://archiveofourown.org/users/galfridian/pseuds/galfridian) for their beta help and encouragement.

Olivia wasn't sleeping. The campaign bus hurtled down I-77, somewhere between Akron, Ohio, and Chapel Hill, North Carolina, the air canned and too warm, the West Virginia witching-hour blackness too starkly interrupted by the glow of laptops and smartphones. She cranked up the Otis Redding on her noise-canceling headphones but stayed alert to the psychic clatter of Super Tuesday approaching. The primaries sounded like a motorcycle in the left lane of a country interstate and an oil tanker on the right. Scylla and Charybdis. No way out but through, and either way the monsters would get them.

Someone sat down next to her. The campaign bus had enough empty seats that no one ever sat down next to anyone else unless they wanted something. Olivia shut her eyes tighter and sang along to "Try a Little Tenderness," not to convince anyone she was sleeping, but to make herself horrible, untouchable, un-meeting-able. 

The person in the next seat unfolded Olivia's tray-table in front of her and set a plastic cup, brimming with thick off-white liquid, in front of her. He lifted the headphone off her ear, cutting through Otis to tell her, "It's Rumchata. You'll gain 25 pounds and wake up two days later in a stranger's apartment. It's the kind of innovation that makes you proud to be an American."

Olivia sighed, turned off her music, and slipped her headphones down around her neck. "I was trying to sleep."

"No, you were pretending to be asleep so you'd fit in." She verified with a side-eye that it was Cyrus.

He set his iPhone on Olivia's tray next to her untouched cup and sipped at his own drink. If the bus hit a pothole, they'd both be covered in Rumchata, and his phone would be ruined. Cyrus was as attentive to detail as Olivia; certainly, he'd created the sense of peril on purpose. 

"What would you do with that picture?" he asked.

The image was of Governor Grant, very young, standing at a podium in a navy prep school blazer, mouth wide, arms spread full in impassioned gesticulation. "That's adorable," Olivia said.

"I didn't ask what you thought of it," Cyrus said. "I asked what you'd do with it."

"Not much," she said. "People like me would find it charming, but people like me don't vote for Republicans. The party base and swing voters would all see a spoiled rich kid. A _nerdy_ one. We might stick it in a photo montage at the Inauguration Ball or put it on his website after he gets elected."

Cyrus gave no indication of whether this was the right answer. Olivia scrolled through the gallery he'd obviously set up to quiz her, wondering how many junior aides before her had failed. She assumed he'd absorbed all of their responses with the same inscrutable, elfin expression, letting all of them think they'd done well while secretly depriving them of any responsibilities that might affect the campaign.

Olivia swiped past a few run-of-the-mill high school portraits - prom, graduation, senior yearbook - and stopped on a snapshot of a college-age Governor Grant with a '90s bowl haircut flopping into his eyes. He wore a frayed corduroy sport coat over a t-shirt advertising something called the Yankee Doodle, and he held an enormous, battered bronze trophy cup over his head. "This one's better," she said. "Still kind of Ivy League, but we're not going to find any pictures of him duck hunting from the back of a pickup truck."

"He doesn't look drunk to you there?" Cyrus didn't indicate whether this was condemnation or encouragement.

"Sure, but there's no direct evidence of it in the photo," she said. "He looks like a regular kid. He looks happy, and everyone likes a winner. This one goes in the press package."

"I'll take your advice into consideration," Cyrus said. Despite his steady attention to his drink, his cup still seemed full. He took the phone from her, tapped and scrolled busily, then handed it back. "What about this one?"

Olivia laughed out loud. The Governor, shot in loving monochrome, lay in a tiled bathtub, grinning with satisfaction as he hip-thrusted an enormous erection toward the camera. "Well, it's Photoshopped," she said. "They've cleaned up the seams nicely, but the shadows on his face aren't right. See how the sunbeams cross the rest of his body?" She traced one with her finger.

"So what do we do when this pops up on Reddit?"

"Well, it won't, because you made it yourself," Olivia said. "But if something similar does, we produce the original photo that they cut his face out of, and we crack a few jokes. It's an internet prank, not a porn scandal."

"A friend made it for me, actually," Cyrus said. "I don't know a photo editor from a hole in the ground. But you'd be surprised how many people freak out about this kind of thing. I'd say it was depressing, but you know - you know who works on political campaigns. The personalities. We're not happy unless there's a crisis we can solve." He put the iPhone in his bag. "Notice how I said _we_ just then, and not _them._ Drink your drink."

Olivia refused again, although now it was more out of petulance than fear of the contents of the cup. If she wanted to be ordered around, she'd call her father.

"Do you know why I showed you that picture?" Cyrus said. "The last one."

"To remind yourself why you're not firing me yet," Olivia said.

"No, I'm not firing you because keeping you around proves me right, and that gives me power. I showed you the picture so I can lecture you about why you should never act on your little -" he made a scooping motion with his hand, as if trying to fish slippery words out of a bowl - "crush on the Governor."

"I don't have a -"

"Sure you do," Cyrus said. "But you haven't acted on it, and you shouldn't."

Olivia wavered between denial and vindictiveness for a moment before choosing the latter. She knew she wouldn't be fired for it. "Because if you can't have him, no one else can?" It wasn't clear to her whether he was out among the campaign staff. At Georgetown, people had spoken of Cyrus's sexuality in the irritable whispers of students who didn't want to imagine their professors' personal lives.

"Please. He's not my type, he's yours, and besides, I'm in love." He took a long sip of his drink, and the solemnity in his eyes hinted that she was the first to know.

"I'm happy for you," she said, although she couldn't unclench her jaw all the way.

"I am an encyclopedia of ways that people have self-detonated promising political careers," Cyrus said. "Please trust me when I tell you that you don't want to do this. As a friend, as your former teacher, as your current boss, as the guy who poured you a drink that I wish you would at least _try._ As whoever you need me to be right now, I am telling you that you don't want to do this."

"What if I need you to be the person that backs the hell off?"

"Well, then you're out of luck, because I have never been that person," Cyrus said. "There's no point. That person is boring, and that person is never going to be the power behind the Presidency."

"Are you trying to get me to convince you to let me have an affair with the Governor?" she said. "If you are, I'm ready. I've been making the case to myself since the day I met him."

"No," Cyrus said. "I am trying to get you to have a drink." He raised his half-empty cup. "Cheers."

"If I give you this crisis, will you enjoy it?" She raised her cup and tapped it carefully against the rim of his. A few drops landed on her tray, and she drank to avoid spilling more. 

"I'm good with sex scandals," Cyrus said. "You're going to be great at them."

"It's not exactly what I want to be known for." She drank. Cyrus was right: the stuff was delicious, creamy and warm-tasting, the kind of bottle she could empty by herself if she wasn't paying attention. 

"Don't worry. You won't be known for it." He looked away from her with the same sad, hopeful expression he'd worn when he'd thought of the lover that he clearly wasn't going to tell her about tonight. "People like you and me run the country, but the country looks right past us. Invisibility is our superpower."

"I noticed how you said _we_ just there," Olivia said, and she drank.


End file.
